History

Virtual Bridges has announced that it has hired Geoff Gilton as the new Vice President of Service Provider Business Strategy, BusinessWire reports.

Gilton who will be responsible for defining the business and go-to-market strategy for the Virtual Bridges VDI platform VERDE. Gilton comes from GQuotient, where he worked for 10 months. Besided that he is also an investor and Strategic Advisor for GQuotient and SevenNumerals. Before that he was Vice President at Devonshire Investors were he worked for 6 years, in that timeframe he worked for 3 1/2 year at COLT Telecommunications.

Microsoft has released a step-by-step guide titled: Deploying Microsoft RemoteFX on a Single Remote Desktop Virtualization Host Server Step-by-Step Guide. The step-by-step guide which contains 23 pages details the steps needed of setting up RemoteFX on a single Remote Desktop Virtualization Host server with a virtual desktop that is accessible by using Remote Desktop Connection (RDC).

The document uses 5 steps to configure the environment:

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Zenoss announced the release of a Free ZenPack which leverages esxtop, the ESX/ESXi equivalent of the Unix "Top" command.

Zenoss is an open source monitoring and system management tool, which is provided in a free Core version and a commercial Enterprise version and is provided as several installers for Linux distributions and Mac OS X or as a VMware Virtual Appliance. Zenpacks provide the functionality of what is monitored within Zenoss.

By running esxtop you can see real-time system performance data of your ESX/ESXi servers, helping you to troubleshoot your VMware environment. The ZenPack integrates this functionality within Zenoss.

The Zenpack provides:

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VMware has announced that it earned Common Criteria Evaluation Assurance Level 4 (EAL4+) for VMware vSphere 4.0 and vCenter Server 4.0. The Common Criteria is an international set of guidelines that provides a common framework for evaluating security features and capabilities of Information Technology (IT) security products, and EAL4+ is the highest assurance level that is recognized globally by all signatories under the Common Criteria Recognition Agreement (CCRA).

For VMware Infrastructure 3 the EAL4+ certification was achieved in June 2008. And VMware announced in August 2009 that it submitted vSphere 4.0 for Common Criteria certification and at that time it expected to earn the certification in H2 2010. Also vSphere 4.1 has been submitted for evaluation.

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Rent-A-Lab has come a long way. When virtualization.info and its Swiss partner Kybernetika launched it almost four years ago the goal was to build an enterprise-class lab where to test latest virtualization products.

Targeting a global audience of professionals that are perpetually on the road, busy at some industry trade shows or at a customer site, we wanted a fast, worldwide accessible facility.
But most of all, we wanted a lab stuffed with next generation hardware, that could help the industry vanguard in evaluating the features and performance of tomorrow’s data center technologies.

The market answered in a phenomenal way, well beyond our expectations. To address the demand, we moved from just 9 rackmount servers to 20, then to 40.
We didn’t just added more servers, we’ve also upgraded (or replaced) the existing ones, continuing to offer one of the most cutting-edge IT infrastructure of the entire Europe.

To achieve the goal, we’ve invested a lot on our own, but we’ve asked the help of the most prominent vendors in the industry. We’ve got impressive support, moving from a single sponsor to 15, which provided all sort of hardware and software equipment, from SAN to firewalls, to glass Internet connection.
VMware and Cisco even selected RAL as their preferred location to run the first UCS Bootcamp in Switzerland.

Now it’s time for the next step: Rent-A-Lab becomes Datacenter on Demand (DonD).

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In September Citrix announced a partnership with Cisco in order to deliver XenDesktop on Unified Computing System (UCS), powered by NetApp storage.

The key promise of the partnership was that Citrix, Cisco and NetApp would jointly validate the infrastructure, by providing a reference architecture and a Starter Kit and Expansion Kit to deliver solutions from entry-level 300 virtual desktop environments scaling to several thousands of desktops. The solution also would provide an choice of back-end hypervisor, initially scoped to Citrix XenServer and VMware ESX.

This week Citrix, Cisco en NetApp delivered their promise by releasing Validated Design Guides on the Cisco website.

The Validated Design Guides contain the following documents:

• Citrix Desktop Virtualization Solution with Citrix XenDesktop: Deliver Desktops and Applications as On-Demand Services which is 20 pages and contains an overview of the provided solutions which are:
  • Cisco UCS Base Pack for Desktop Virtualization, which supports between 300 and 700 desktops.
  • Cisco UCS Expansion Pack for VDI-Based Desktops, which increases the capacity of the base pack with 400 desktops
  • Cisco UCS Expansion Pack for Hosted Shared Desktops, which increases the capacity to host up to tens of thousand session-based desktops.

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Microsoft has made available a free eBook called: Understanding Microsoft Virtualization Solutions, From the Desktop to the Datacenter (Second Edition).

The eBook written by Mitch Tulloch, is an update to the earlier version which was released last year. This new version is now updated for Windows Server 2008 R2 and contains six chapters and has a total of 466 pages.

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InstallFree announced that it now supports Virtual Applications on Windows 7 64-bit editions for it’s Bridge and 7bridge products , eSchool News reports.

Bridge is a product to create autonomous virtual applications, which don’t require an agent on the target OS to run. The product is capable of updating and patching those applications without the need to repackage the application. With the release of version 2.0 the company announced support for Windows 7, which is now extended to Windows 7 64-bit editions as well as of version 2.1.5.3 which is now Generally Available.

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In July, along with the major release 4.1 of vSphere, VMware also updated its physical to virtual (P2V) migration tool vCenter Converter to version 4.2 (build 254483). Just a month later, the company also updated the standalone edition of the tool to version 4.3 (build 292238).

An important information that passed under our radar about these upgrades is that VMware dropped support for Windows NT 4 and Windows 2000, along with support for the OVF format and the VMware Consolidated Backup (VCB) format.

A virtualization.info reader reports that it’s still possible to convert a physical Windows 2000 into a vSphere 4.1 virtual machine by using the old Converter 4.0.1 standalone, despite this scenario is not supported by VMware.
A Support engineer provided the following “workaround” to our reader:

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With the release of VMware vSphere 4.1, VMware made available the vStorage APIs for Array Integration (VAAI). The VAAI can offload specific storage operations to compliant storage hardware, which results in less CPU, memory and storage fabric bandwidth consumption.

Chad Sakac who is Vice President VMware Technology Alliance at EMC wrote a blog post in July detailing what the impact of using the VAAI means for normal operations and what the benefits are in terms of performance improvements.

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